The return of “Roman Piso”!
Cranks come, and cranks go. If you’re around online long enough, you’re bound to see a few.
The turnover is probably for the best, in a way. The nutters with online longevity seem to get nastier and nastier over time. It’s probably the brooding, I imagine: however stupid other people are, sitting and concentrating on the defects of others is liable to distort your point of view! There will never be any shortage of folly in the world, that’s for sure.
Months ago, I was looking on my hard disk and found a directory “/piso”. How that brought back memories! There was a strange chap posting back in the day in usenet about how Jesus was really some member of the Roman family which used the cognomen “Piso”. I found a thread from 1999 here, for instance, and by name here in 2002, and talking to me in the same year. There was some association with a booklet by a Jewish polemicist calling himself Abelard Reuchlin, which I never got to the bottom of.
The details of his theory were rather incoherent, and the reasoning as shaky as is normal. But I remembered the gentleman in question — who used to post as “Roman Piso” — because he seemed a harmless soul, and posted about his obsession without malice. He vanished from the web years ago, and I always wondered where he went.
Well today I know — for on the David Icke website, he has reappeared! On Boxing Day he spake thusly:
Here is Proof, that Josephus’ Plutarchus Created Christianity.
Titus Flavius Josephus and Lucius Plutarchus are the same person, thus i nickname “Josephus Plutarchus”, in reality, his real name is “Arrius Piso”. …
Mmm. He joined the site on Christmas Day, and managed a sterling 66 posts in the last 3 days.
I don’t know if anyone else remembers him, but if so, well, it’s nice to see him back again.
There was a review of Reuchlin’s booklet, which is now at the internet archive here: http://web.archive.org/web/20031002104004/http://members.shaw.ca/chatfunk/The+Arrius+Piso+as+author+of+the+New+Testament+theory+is+a+hoax.htm
I’m not 100% sure, but as far as I know the person called “Roman Piso” is an author called John Duran who seems to have been extending Reuchlin’s conspiracy theory, in at least two books, as “Roman Piso” in The Synthesis of Christianity – or – The Real Reason for the War Between the Romans and the Jews. (How and Why Ancient Rulers Needed to Create a Universal Religion), and as John Duran in The Origin of Christianity), both apparently published in some form in 2000.
The oldest Wright brother (older than Wilbur and Orville) was named Reuchlin. I don’t know why Bishop Wright named his eldest “Reuchlin”, but he did. Probably some Brethren church personality, or an old family name on one side or another.
I think that the name goes back to the reformation, but I don’t know its history.
Wow; I can remember dealing with this stuff back in my Bible college days.
Abelard was the avante-garde theologian who lived in the time of St. Bernard and was the teacher/soulmate/seducer of Heloise. Reuchlin was a Hebrew scholar; it was his copy of Revelation which was loaned to Erasmus, who arranged to have its text extracted as the basis for the text of Revelation in his printed Greek New Testament. (And because its text was not altogether legible, and because it was missing the last six verses, textual critics will never hear the end of how Erasmus created new readings here and there in Revelation, and resorted to retro-translating the last six verses from Latin into Greek.)
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
I remember these guys! I had fun baiting them back in the day – bad me (I’ve mellowed since). A bunch of that old stuff’s still online:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.apologetics/browse_thread/thread/a6e0172577ded643/a7bd0df757149827?pli=1
Well, trolling is bad whoever the victim is. But thanks for the link — yes, it’s certainly still accessible!